Why AP called the Arizona Senate race for Ruben Gallego

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Associated Press declared Democrat Ruben Gallego the winner of Arizona's U.S. Senate seat after vote updates on Monday and over the weekend increased his statewide lead and closed off any remaining paths to victory for Republican Kari Lake.

At the time the AP called the race at 11:49 p.m. ET, Gallego led Lake with 50% of the vote to 48%, a margin of nearly 73,000 votes with about 95% of the total vote counted. In order to overtake Gallego, Lake would need to win about seven out of every 10 of the estimated 181,000 ballots that remain to be counted.

That was too high a hurdle for the Republican nominee to clear, considering most of the untabulated ballots come from Maricopa and Pima counties, where she's only been getting about 46% and 38% of the vote, respectively. In a large vote update on Monday night, Lake received only 42% of the vote in Maricopa, far short of what she needed to get to stay on track to overtake Gallego.

The AP only declares a winner once it can determine that a trailing candidate can’t close the gap and overtake the vote leader.

Here’s a look at how the AP called this race:

CANDIDATES: Gallego (D) vs. Lake (R) vs. Eduardo Quintana (Green).

WINNER: Gallego

POLL CLOSING TIME: 9 p.m. ET on Nov 5. Arizona does not release votes until all precincts have reported or one hour after all polls are closed, whichever is first, usually 10 p.m. ET.

ABOUT THE RACE: Arizona's Senate seat is open after incumbent independent Kyrsten Sinema decided not to seek a second term.

The contest pits Lake, a former local TV news anchor and 2022 gubernatorial candidate, against Gallego, a five-term U.S. representative and Marine veteran.

Lake became a darling of the populist right after leaving the anchor chair and has tried but struggled to redefine herself since losing in 2022. She never conceded her race for governor, and she fought the outcome in court even after launching her Senate campaign.

Gallego represents largely Latino areas of Phoenix and has run ads playing up his military service and up-by-the-bootstraps personal story over his progressive record in the House.

Arizona has been nearly evenly divided in statewide elections since 2016. Former President Donald Trump won the state with about 49% of the vote that year. He won in 2024 with about 51% of the vote as of the latest count. But Democratic candidates for Senate, president and governor won in 2018, 2020 and 2022.

WHY AP CALLED THE RACE: In statewide elections going back a dozen years, Democrats have always carried four counties in both winning and losing campaigns: Apache, Coconino, Pima and Santa Cruz. Democrats who also carried the most populous county of Maricopa won their elections, while those who lost Maricopa also lost statewide.

Gallego had large leads over Lake in the core four Democratic counties and was also slightly ahead in Maricopa at the time the race was called, outperforming Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris' showing there by about 4 percentage points.

Lake would need to win about 69% of the remaining uncounted ballots in order to catch Gallego, but more than two-thirds of those ballots come from Maricopa and the core four Democratic counties, where she was not winning anywhere near the 60% mark. Lake is at about 60% of the vote in the three Republican-friendly counties with a significant amount of untabulated ballots (Cochise, Yavapai and Yuma), but she would need to win the remaining votes in those counties by a much larger margin in order to offset her lower vote shares in Maricopa and the four Democratic counties. The latest vote updates since the weekend showed she was not hitting those targets in enough places to take the lead from Gallego.

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Learn more about how and why the AP declares winners in U.S. elections at Explaining Election 2024, a series from The Associated Press aimed at helping make sense of the American democracy. The AP receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.